LiveTime has some exciting new features and a host of new UI enhancements that we know are going to blow you away. Here are just a few…

Relationship Impact Map LiveTime has introduced a new multi-level relationship map so Technicians can readily see the impact of an outage and related infrastructure directly within the CMDB or the request itself. As the information is dynamically updated by third party monitoring tools Technicians will see a view of the entire business and it’s related services. ITSM Relationship Map Multisource LDAP Multiple LDAP connections allows organizations with different authentication servers in various locations and timezones to synchronize with LiveTime, providing a federated source of Service Desk Customers and Technicians. Line Manager Approvals The introduction of line manager approvals for Service and Change Requests. By associating line managers with Customers, when a Request is logged that requires management approval prior to processing, the Request can be automatically routed to the appropriate manager for approval. For service organizations that propose changes and updates to their customers’ environments, customers will have the ability to approve or reject work proposed by the service provider.

Workflow Map Another big change relates to the workflow editor which is more interactive and fully animated allowing technicians and customers to see exactly where they are in the entire process and the next steps available. Workflow Map Scheduled Reporting The ability to configure scheduled reports across User Groups. Within the Administrator Portal, out-of-the-box and custom-built reports can be selected and scheduled for automatic emailing to Supervisor, Manager, Technician, Finance and Administrator Users, ensuring User relevant data is sent on a regular basis. The Custom Report Builder also includes functional enhancements. Process Switching For Service Desks with Request Fulfillment and Incident Management, requests that are generated as an Incident can be readily toggled to a Service Request, and vice versa, while maintaining one identification number. This means customer correspondence will be more easily managed and the request’s history available within a single audit trail. Knowledge Import The capability to import Knowledge Base Articles using a .CSV file, providing service organizations with the convenience of importing large amounts of information stored in external sources with a single file. Planned Outages Map Users will also notice the capability to create Planned Outages for Multiple Items. Users will be able to easily traverse the relationship map to see all infrastructure that is to be related to the Planned Outage and apply the improved notifications to update Customers accordingly.

Nagios is a popular event management application. With it’s scriptable commands and plugins, it is very customizable for performing any action when a monitor alert is triggered. This document will demonstrate how to communicate directly with LiveTime’s CMDB and update CI’s in realtime with bi-directional feeds back to Nagios and LiveTime.

When a check fails and the monitor alerts, one common result can be that an incident is created whilst the failing service is investigated. With the event-handler capability of Nagios and LiveTime’s inbound web services, this is simple to setup.

Additionally, with LiveTime’s outbound web services and run book automation the event-handler can be paused and re-instated after the incident has been dealt with. This makes it easy to have the Nagios alert create just one request and then only create new ones once the issue with the service has been resolved. This is especially useful for services that are intermittently working/failing and alerting on the Nagios monitors.

Furthermore, if the CMDB in LiveTime is configured correctly, it can be possible to identify the item in question and take the item offline in LiveTime, restoring the item after the incident has been resolved.

Operational Workflow

1. Service fails and alerts in Nagios
2. The Nagios event handler calls a PHP script
3. The PHP script parses the host and service names from Nagios and utilizing LiveTime’s inbound web services, it determines the item in the CMDB in question. If the Item for the service is not found that is related to the host, then it falls back then it falls back to the default item configured in the script.
4. An incident is raised against the item established in step 3
5. If an exact item match is found in step 3, the item’s status is taken offline
6. If the incident is successfully created, to prevent further requests being created, the event handler is disabled for the alert in Nagios via a web request with the host and service parsed in step 3.
7. The Nagios check that triggered this is recorded as the first note on the incident.
8. Once the issue is resolved, the incident is moved into a status which has an outbound web services script attached to it.
9. Outbound script reads the first note on the incident to establish the Nagios check involved and re-enables the event handler on Nagios for this, via a web request.
10. It also updates the item on incident back to it’s available status, if an item was identified in step 3.

Setup

For the purposes of this document, the Nagios Virtual Machine was used. This is available for download from the Nagios website. If Nagios is already setup and running, then skip to the last step of these instructions as ensuring php-soap is installed is the most important step here.

Once running, the admin pages are at:

http://host/nagiosxi/

The user pages are at:

http://host/nagios/

To avoid having to rely on accessing the console output of the virtual machine, the firewall needs opening up to allow local users access. To do this, for all ports, on a 192.168.1.0/24 based network (for example), one would login as root using the default password of nagiosxi and run:

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp -s 192.168.1.0/24 -j ACCEPT
iptables-save
service iptables save

Some checks then need to be added via the admin pages. For the example in this document, we add an FTP check to a Windows server named Windows 101.

If the auto discovery wizard is to be used to quickly get some checks added, where you pick which machines you want to check after it completes, traceroute needs to be installed first.

To do this login as root and run:

yum install traceroute

To get files to/from the virtual machine, one method my be to use scp, and to do that, you would need to first run:

yum install openssh-clients

Finally, PHP is already installed on the virtual machine but for web services commands to run, php-soap also needs to be installed. This is done by running:

yum install php-soap

Creating the Request in LiveTime

A web services script is created to do this, and this is copied to the Nagios server. There is a scripts folder already setup on Nagios so in our example we copied the script as:

/usr/local/nagiosxi/scripts/lt_nagios_create_request.php

In Nagios go to the admin Configure > Core Configuration Manager (http://192.168.1.125/nagiosxi/config/nagioscorecfg/)
Select Commands drop down > Commands > Add new
Enter the following, making sure Active is ticked and click Save:

Command:

lt-create-request

Command Line:
/usr/local/nagiosxi/scripts/lt_nagios_create_request.php $SERVICESTATE$ $SERVICESTATETYPE$ $SERVICEATTEMPT$ $HOSTNAME$ $SERVICEDESC$

Command Type:
Misc

To complete this addition, click Apply Configuration.

Next, Under Monitoring, Click Services.

Find the service that needs to create a request on alert (in our example, the Config Name is ‘Windows 101’ and the Service Name is ‘FTP’) and click tools icon to edit it.

Under the Check Settings tab, use the drop down for Event handler to select lt-create-request and set the enabled option to on.

Click to save those settings and then click Apply Configuration to complete this modification.

Configuring the LiveTime CMDB

For the correct item to be used, there are a number of ways to do this, but in our example PHP script, we set it up so the host is an item in LiveTime, and the Nagios Service being tested is also an item in LiveTime.

For instance, you might have a server numbered ‘Windows 101’ as the host with and FTP service running on it, which for this we have assigned an item numbered ‘FTP101’, which is of the type ‘FTP’. The items are then setup in a relationship so that the ‘FTP101’ is installed on ‘Windows 101’.

The number of the actual service item doesn’t matter but in our example the number of the host item does, if items are not to be assigned to the default item.

The example script first attempts to locate the item numbered the same as the host, ‘Windows 101’ and then looks for a related item of the type matching the service being checked, ‘FTP’. It finds the item ‘FTP101’ so it picks that item for the new incident.

If it didn’t find an FTP type of item related to the host, it would just raise it would just raise it against the default item.

The script will also update the item status to an Offline one but only if it finds an exact match to the service. If not, it will not update it. This is purely in the example script so obviously can be configured as required.

Also, the example script is not strict on the relationship type, for the purposes of demonstrating this. It could be further amended to only look at services installed on the host, as opposed to those also used by the host, if other relationships existed in the CMDB in question. This could readily be added to the script.

Re-activating the Event Handler

LiveTime’s outbound web services can be used to call a script to reactivate the event handler in LiveTime once the request has reached a status where the service issues have been resolved.

Additionally, the script can call back to LiveTime’s inbound web services to update the item’s status as online, if an exact item was identified and placed into an offline state in the original script that created the request.

As a Java application, the scripts behind LiveTime’s outbound web services need to be in Java.

For the best performance, the script that performs these actions should ideally be coded in Java. However, for the purposes of this demonstration, it is also possible to code enough java to call another command, which can then be coded in any language. In our case, we are going to call a PHP script as we can then reuse some of the code used in the initial script too.

The script sends, as command line arguments, the status change involved (ie. if the status was Entered or Exited), the request number and the item number on the request. The PHP command then reads these and performs the required actions.

To install the provided code for this, jump to step 3 below and copy the included jar file over to the location specified. However, if making changes to the script, the following needs to be done:

1. To amend the code, copy this file to the folder with the java file in:

{LiveTime Install Folder}/LiveTime.woa/Contents/Resources/Java/livetime-listen.jar

2. After all required changes have been made, the following commands need to be entered:

javac lt_nagios_resolved.java
jar cf lt_nagios_resolved.jar lt_nagios_resolved.class -classpath livetime-listen.jar

3. The resulting lt_nagios_resolved.jar file then needs to be coped to the the following location on the LiveTime server:

{LiveTime Install Folder}/LiveTime/WEB-INF/lib/

After this, the LiveTime application server, needs to be restarted for this to be picked up.

By default, the java code is calling ‘php /root/lt_nagios_resolved.php’. As such, php and php-soap need to be installed on the LiveTime server, along with copying lt_nagios_resolved.php to the /root/ folder.

Note that the PHP script is set to change the status of the service to ‘Available’ in line with the online status provided by default for items of the Service category in LiveTime. This can be modified according to what is in use.

In fact, the script could be further developed to look for ‘Available’ and if that wasn’t present, try ‘Online’, etc, if multiple item category types were used. Obviously that is up to the user to add such coding.

Finally, to call this java code, the workflow used for dealing with the alert requires a status that is linked to the class in the jar file created above. To do this, ‘Outbound Web Services’ needs to be enabled under Setup > Privileges > System and the status in question is then updated so that it’s Listener Class is:

lt_nagios_resolved

Nagios Closed Loop Example Code - 9.04 kB zip

Newport Beach, CA – May 24, 2011 – LiveTime Software, a leading provider of On-Premise and SaaS based Service Management (ITSM) solutions, today announced the addition Single Sign-On capabilities using OpenID providers such as Google and Yahoo, for seamless access to its IT Service Management solution. Customers can now integrate directly with Google Docs and maintain a single workflow from within LiveTime Service Manager or Novell Service Desk.

Organizations can now manage their email communications, spreadsheets, and other LiveTime documents directly in Google Docs, without requiring another login, eliminating another password users would need to remember. This makes it even easier for customers to generate service requests and monitor progress through LiveTime Service Manager or Novell Service Desk. LiveTime 6.5 makes it even easier for customers to leverage the power of LiveTime’s core CMDB and knowledge infrastructure, enabling faster response times and lower support costs.

LiveTime has been able to transform organizations’ customer service into agile, knowledge-based service delivery using ITIL v3 best practices. By removing the complex and expensive customization and training normally associated with legacy ITIL products, customers are able to implement LiveTime within a matter of weeks not months.

Available On Demand (SaaS) or On Premise (software, hardware or virtual appliance), LiveTime is based on open standards and supports any operating system, any browser, and any database. LiveTime is used by many global 2000 companies such as Lockheed Martin, Verizon, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Deloitte and Disney.

About NuVista Energy

NuVista Energy is an independent Canadian oil and natural gas exploration, development and production company with its common shares trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the symbol “NVA”.

Challenge

With employees and contractors spread across the Western Canadian Oil Patch, it was difficult for NuVista Energy to consistently keep workstations running smoothly. In addition, as the business grew, the company needed a more sophisticated approach to service desk call management. “We had no software in place to manage support requests,” said Robert Cahoon, IT systems analyst for NuVista Energy Ltd. “To improve service to our users, we wanted greater visibility and accountability for problem resolution.”

The company needed a solution that would accommodate its heterogeneous environment. “We have a combination of cutting-edge technology as well as antiquated systems that we need to support so it was important to find a solution that would run on any operating system,” said Cahoon.

Solution

NuVista Energy began using Novell ZENworks® Configuration Management to remotely manage its workstations, bringing greater consistency in application and patch distribution. If a user reports an issue, a technician simply remote controls into the device so they can quickly resolve the problem. “Some of our offices are a 12-hour trip away, so having a tool like Novell ZENworks Configuration Management to remotely fix workstation issues has been a huge advantage,” said Cahoon.

As they began exploring service desk solutions, NuVista Energy turned to Adaris Technologies, a Novell Platinum Partner™. “After an extensive comparison of many of the industry’s top offerings we decided on Novell Service Desk,” said Cahoon. “Our team had several meetings to determine our ‘needs’ and ‘wants’ for a ticketing system. Novell Service Desk was the only one to fill all of our ‘needs’ and even our ‘nice to have’ wants in a ticket system. Not only did it do all that, but the price point was great! Installation and integration into our existing Active Directory and Novell ZENworks environments was very easy—we were up and running in no time.”

ITIL support was another attractive feature. “We’re looking to incorporate some ITIL-certified processes for our help desk, and Novell Service Desk will come in handy for that,” said Cahoon. “We’ll be able to easily generate outage tracking and other key reports for auditors.”

Adaris played a key role in the project. “Adaris provided tremendous value,” said Cahoon. “Not only did they help us get the most out of our Novell ZENworks deployment, they helped us get up and running quickly with Novell Service Desk.”

“Support tickets are now managed through Novell Service Desk, providing greater accountability across the support organization,” said Cahoon. “This really helps with speeding call resolution.”

Results

Today, Novell ZENWorks Configuration Management allows NuVista Energy to remotely manage and update its workstations spread across the country. This enables the company to respond to critical needs much faster. “In the past, if one of our field offices needed a critical application, they would have had to ship the workstation to us,” said Cahoon. “Now we can remotely install a new application in minutes.”

The solution has also helped the company avoid significant IT support costs. “We recently patched 175 workstations at once in just an hour, with few issues,” said Cahoon. “Prior to implementing Novell ZENworks, that just wouldn’t have been possible. In fact without it, I would have had to double our staff. We’re also saving thousands of dollars in travel costs.”

NuVista Energy also plans to use the Novell solution to reduce the time and complexity of its Windows 7 migration. “It used to take six hours for a technician to build each new workstation and a lot of user profiles could get lost in the process,” said Cahoon. “With Novell ZENworks, we can handle this in 30 minutes or less, and migrate user profiles to their new workstations.”

Novell Service Desk has also provided significant benefits. “We’ve freed up about one quarter of our IT staff’s time using Novell Service Desk,” said Cahoon. “They’re now able to spend more time focused on meeting the business needs of our users.”

The solution has also helped build cooperation between end users and the IT team. “Novell Service Desk helped improve the perception of IT and let users know what we’re doing to resolve their issues promptly,” said Cahoon.

As part of LiveTime’s continual service improvement program and commitment to quality, monthly product updates are made available to all current customers. These releases guarantee that LiveTime customers have access to the most reliable and secure production version of its service management tool. The updates are optional.

LiveTime’s service and support team will notify any organizations that are possibly affected by software bugs addressed in the latest release, and provide assistance with the upgrade process.

September 10, 2010

Requests

• Change requests now reassign immediately on approval to prevent double processing
• Service Requests will now assign to the appropriate layer in the event the assigned team is changed
• Public and Private note options will now toggle the Customer recipient checkbox to avoid warnings
• Requests received via email will now process the priority flag from Microsoft Exchange
• Release Management now copes with new & replacement CI’s generated from existing CI types
• Deployment tasks can now have their ‘Forward Schedule of Change’ date bulk edited

ITIL

• The team tab is no longer accessible to users with only the Finance role
• Self mail preference will now be correctly applied to knowledge base solution emails
• KBA RFC control will no longer prevent the knowledge base article from being reindexed
• Incident Analyser will no longer apply problem creation rules to Service Requests

Email

• Survey links now function correctly for technicians with a customer role
• Emails received from team members will now be communicated to the customer Emails received from a vendor as a note to a request will now correctly update that request

Service Level Agreements

• SLA Response timers no longer recognize messages from shared owners as a response
• Service Level determination will now prioritize the SLA assigned to the customer, then the org unit, and CI

General

• Various errors received from customers with the ‘email errors to LiveTime’ option set have been addressed
• Added Dutch translation

Detailed Release Notes 6.1.2 - 242.96 kB pdf

Parameters

Description

This function is used to return a list of all Configuration Item fields for a particular Item Number.

The function returns two HashMaps, the first containing a list of CI field Ids, and the second containing the field values include the field name, whether the field is required, the data type, the field’s default value (if specified), and the field options if any are available.

Get Fields For Item Type

Parameters

Description

This ‘getFieldsForItemType’  function is used to return a list of all Configuration Item fields for a particular Item Type. Enter an Item Type ID.

The function returns two HashMaps, the first containing a list of CI field Ids, and the second containing the field values include the field name, whether the field is required, the data type, the field’s default value (if specified), and the field options if any are available.

Get Fields For Related Item

Parameters

Description

This function is used to return information on all relationships for the particular Item Number.

It returns a HashMap of HashMaps, the outer keyed on the Item Numbers – the HashMap for each Item contains data such as the related Item Number, Criticality, Type and how it’s related to the Item with the given itemNumber.

Create Manufacturer

Parameters

Description

This functions creates a Manufacturer with the given name.

Parameters

Description

This function adds a new Customer to an Item with a given itemNumber.

Remove Item Owner

Parameters

Description

This function removes an existing Customer from an Item with a given itemNumber.

Get Item Owners

Parameters

Description

Use this function to list all owners of an Item with a given itemNumber.

The function returns a HashMap which contains another HashMap for each entry. The key of the first map is the Customer ID of the returned user, the HashMap for that entry contains four string fields representing the Customer’s Last Name, Org Unit, Primary E-mail Address and First Name. Global items will return a success response message.

Parameters

Description

Use this function to enter a new Configuration Item (CI). Enter the Item Type ID, a Customer ID, and a set of Item Type field values.

The fieldValues HashMap is a Map of Strings to Strings. The keys represent LiveTime data fields called custom1 through to custom20. These map to the category field definitions within the CMS. Other keys include itemNumber which allow the item to be created with a given item number (provided the Edit Item Numbers admin privilege is enabled).

The function returns a HashMap containing the Configuration Item ID and a success or failure message.

Delete Item

Parameters

Description

This function flags an Item as deleted so that it is no longer available for new requests.

Un-Delete Item

Parameters

Description

This function re-instates a previously deleted Item so that it is available for all future requests.

Update Item

Parameters

Description

This function updates and Item with new field values from the supplied hash map.

The fieldValues HashMap is a map of Strings to Strings. The keys represent LiveTime data fields called custom1 through to custom20. Other keys include itemstatus and itemNumber for changes to the item status and item number fields respectively. These map to the Category field definitions within the CMDB.

Get Items

Parameters

Description

The ‘getItems’ methods return a list of the item numbers that are either global or owned by the logged in Customer (or the Customer specified if using the customerId function). The response is in the form of a HashMap that uses the list of Item Numbers as field names. Each field has as its value a String containing the name of the Item Type that the Item represents.

In the event that no Items are found for the logged in Customer, only the ‘message’ field will be present and will contain a text message explaining that no Items were found.

The function returns a HashMap containing a list of string values detailing the Item Number(s) and description(s). This will only return the first 100 items. Use getItems(customerId, pageNdx) to page through larger result sets.

Get All Items

The ‘getAllItems’ function returns a list of Item Numbers for all the Items in the system. A page index is required to specify the ‘page’ required. Each page contains 100 entries, ordered by Item Number. The response is in the form of a HashMap that uses the list of Item Numbers as field names. Each field has as its value a String containing the name of the Item Type that the Item represents.

Get Specific Item

The ‘getSpecificItem’ function returns the Item Type of the supplied Item Number. This method exists solely to provide a quick means to verify that a certain Item Number is defined in the system, without requiring heavy data exchange of Item attributes.

Customer Items

Parameters

Description

The ‘customerItems’ function returns a list of the item numbers that are either owned by the customer or are global. The response is in the form of a HashMap that uses the list of item numbers as field names. Each field has as its value a String containing the name of the Item Type that the Item represents.

In the argument (customerId) enter the ID of a Customer, i.e. this is assigned to the Customer when it is created via the createCustomer function.

Possible values for sortNdx are:
1 – Item Number
2 – Item Category
3 – Item Type
7 – Item Status
8 – Purchase Date
9 – Incident Team

In Service Manager, you can also specify:
10 – Problem Team
11 – Change Team
12 – Service Request Team

In the event that no Items are found for the Customer, only the ‘message’ field will be present and will contain a text message explaining that no Items were found.

The function returns a HashMap containing a list of string values detailing the Item Number(s) and description(s), being the corresponding Item Types.

Org Unit Items

Parameters

Description

Use this function to search for Items owned by the logged in User’s Org Unit or the Org Unit ID specified.

The function returns a HashMap of HashMaps. The keys of the first map are the Item Numbers. Each Item Number has its own HashMap representing the values that represent Item attributes as name-value pairs.

Possible values for sortNdx are:
1 – Item Number
2 – Item Category
3 – Item Type
7 – Item Status
8 – Purchase Date
9 – Incident Team

In Service Manager, you can also specify:
11 – Problem Team
12 – Change Team